• Doctor
  • Urgent care service or mobile doctor

Archived: Urgent Care Centre (RUH)

Overall: Requires improvement read more about inspection ratings

Royal United Hospital, Combe Park, Bath, BA1 3NG 0300 123 1761

Provided and run by:
Vocare Limited

Latest inspection summary

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Background to this inspection

Updated 2 February 2018

Urgent Care Centre, Royal United Hospital (RUH) is the registered location for urgent care centre and GP out-of-hours (OOH) services provided by Vocare Limited based at the RUH. Vocare provides two services within Bath and North East Somerset (BaNES) under a contract with the BaNES Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). The Urgent Care Centre Paulton is a GP OOH service provided at Paulton Memorial Hospital which shares the staff and processes with the Urgent Care Centre at RUH, it has been inspected separately as it is registered as a separate location with the CQC.

The urgent care centre service covers a population of approximately 540,000 people across the county of Bath and North East Somerset. Deprivation in BaNES overall is lower than the national average and it has relatively low numbers of patients from different cultural backgrounds.

The urgent care centre provides 24 hour care, seven days a week from the emergency department within the Royal United Hospital, Bath. This service accommodates NHS 111 referrals and walk in patients. Upon attendance patients present to the emergency department reception where basic details are taken and added to their electronic system which is shared with the urgent care centre. The patient is then assessed by an urgent care centre streaming nurse and then booked into the appropriate department if they require treatment.

There is a CQC registered manager for the urgent care service who is not based locally. Due to service growth in the South West of England Vocare have employed a regional director, local clinical director, clinical support manager and lead nurse practitioner who are all based locally to this particular service to provide visible local management and support.

Overall inspection

Requires improvement

Updated 2 February 2018

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Urgent Care Centre, RUH on 28 February and 1 March 2017. The service was rated requires improvement for providing safe services. The overall rating for the service was good. The full comprehensive report on the 28 February and 1 March 2017 inspection can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Urgent Care Centre, RUH on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

This inspection was an announced focused inspection carried out on 12 December 2017 to confirm that the service had carried out their plan to meet the legal requirements in relation to the breach in regulation that we identified in our previous inspection on 28 February and 1 March 2017. This report covers our findings in relation to those requirements and also the additional concerns that were identified.

Overall the service is now rated as Requires Improvement

Our key findings were as follows:

  • Systems that were in place for checking of medicines and equipment were not operating effectively.
  • Not all staff had received chaperone training and management were unaware of this.
  • Not all staff had received performance appraisals.

There were areas of practice where the provider needs to make improvements.

Importantly, the provider must:

  • Ensure care and treatment is provided in a safe way to service users.
  • Ensure that systems and processes are established and operating effectively to support good governance.
  • Ensure that staff have received appropriate appraisal.



Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice